Websites Go Crazy Tracking Urban Eccentrics

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Websites Go Crazy Tracking Urban Eccentrics

The muscular New York City marvel known as He-Man takes a break. Fans of the well-known character keep tabs on him on the Find He-Man website.Photo courtesy Find He-Man Every city has its urban eccentrics – those can't-miss characters who seem to make full-time jobs out of being seen (and sometimes heard) around town.

From bare-chested marvels to perpetual protesters with crazy signs, these colorful people are being turned into unlikely internet celebrities by a new breed of local websites that use social networks, citizen reporting, mapping mashups and a healthy dose of humor to chronicle their subjects' activities.

In Manhattan, the Find He-Man blog publishes readers' daily sightings of an outrageously muscular, consistently shirtless man who bears a distinct resemblance to the comic book hero.

"He's kind of a local celebrity," says Paul Briganti, a student at the School of Visual Arts who launched the blog with his comedy group, beast. "It started because I was at a bank talking to a friend about this guy and someone overheard me and knew who we were talking about. Then I started to realize that pretty much everyone knew who he was, so we decided to start this kind of fan community."

The sites track their respective urban eccentrics with a paparazzo-style intensity usually reserved for movie stars. It's a model similar to Gawker Stalker, a celebrity-mapping site that caused controversy when it launched in 2006. While Gawker Stalker uses a Google Maps mashup to track stars spotted on New York City streets in real time, tracking local color online is almost as old as the web itself. The Knowhere Guide, an alternative U.K. travel guide from the early 1990s, included user-contributed sightings of "local heroes" that frequently features street eccentrics.

The Find He-Man blog brings in an average of 10,000 to 15,000 visits a month and receives enough He-Man sightings to post frequent updates, which the editors plot on a Platial map mashup and embellish with a hefty dash of humor. A typical entry: "April 17 – Jenn saw He-Man at a drum circle in Washington Square Park playing the bongos. The instant His hand made contact with the rawhide, a huge blast erupted that cleared out most of NYU's campus."

Lele McLeod says she modeled her Seattle Notables blog, which tracks local characters rather than Hollywood stars, on Gawker Stalker.

Instead, Seattle Notables tracks local residents like Slats, aka "the Original Hipster," a quirky musician and nightclub aficionado noticeable for his Ramones-esque leather outfit and scraggly mop of brown hair hidden under a broad-brimmed black hat.

"You see him all over town, at every bar," says McLeod. "He's kind of like a Where's Waldo."

Readers submit sightings of Slats and other notables like Link the Zelda Hunter, a local resident with a fashion sense reminiscent of Nintendo's green-clad protagonist, and Juan the Frye Apartment Guy, who has spent the better part of the last two decades parked on a downtown street corner yelling that the Seattle Police, the local housing authority and Fidel Castro conspired to steal his apartment. The sightings are plotted on a Yahoo map mashup, and readers link to photos on Flickr.

Slats, who is also the subject of a Where's Slats? forum on the website of alternative weekly The Stranger, seems somewhat put off by the attention, but has developed a healthy, celebrity-style tolerance for his pesky fan base.

"It's kind of strange when I go in a bar and everyone's taking a picture of me, or I walk down the street and they're yelling my name," says Slats, whose real name is Chris. "I'm just living my life and all of a sudden it's like, 'Whoa, what's going on?'"

"I don't think Juan the Frye Apartment Guy wants to be a celebrity in any way," says McLeod. "He just wants people to know the Seattle police stole his apartment, and he's kind of oblivious to all this attention."

Are we headed toward a Web 2.0-fueled world of microcelebrity where every semi-interesting human is worthy of fan clubs, rabid devotees and citizen paparazzi? To hear Slats explain his unlikely fame, he might as well already be Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears.

"It's amazing how much time people spend on this," says Slats. "I thought it was gonna die down by now, but it hasn't stopped. I get kind of mad when people write things that aren't true, but, you know, people are gonna write whatever they want to write and you just gotta roll with it. I try not to take it too seriously."